There was one story that particularly impressed me, and that I told with particular eclat, I remember. It was called "World of the Red Sun" and it appeared in the December 1931 issue of Wonder Stories* The author of the story (I discovered years later) was Clifford D. Simak. It was his first published story.
My interaction with my fellow junior-high-school students, even those I knew best, was, however, limited to school hours. Thanks to the candy store, I rarely saw them afterward. That meant I could never reinforce the friendship with social nonschool camaraderies.
I was sufficiently extroverted so that I could fit in cheerfully, if temporarily, especially if I had something to offer (like the stories I told). But no one sought me out.
The result is that I remember almost none of my classmates at any level—even in college. There are many who remember me (I was loudmouthed and eccentric enough to be remembered), and it always embarrasses me to be unable to return the compliment.
As a matter of fact, this has set up a pattern that I have kept throughout life. I am universally friendly in all work settings, yet engage in surprisingly few social interactions outside work—not at all because I am morose and antisocial, but because the social function in me atrophied at an early age.
Perhaps I am all the more friendly at work for that reason, dragging in the energies that would otherwise be expended socially—so that I routinely invade my publishers' offices, for instance, with loud cries and totally inappropriate madness that utterly disrupt the workaday atmosphere.
4
It was about then, also, that, for the first time, I began to try to write stories of my own. You would think, considering my literary interests as just described, that those first stories would have been science
4 Science Wonder Stories, with which I initiated my science-fiction reading had a sister magazine, Air Wonder Stories. They lasted as separate magazines for about a year, and with the June 1930 issue, they were combined as Wonder Stories.
fiction, but you would be wrong. I had a most exalted notion of the intense skills and vast scientific knowledge required of authors in the field, and I dared not aspire to such things. Instead, I aimed elsewhere.
The 1920s, you see, were the heyday of series books—books about given characters who appeared in book after book indefinitely. There were the Tom Swift books, which were in a way a kind of mild Jules Vernish sort of thing, and for younger readers, The Bobbsey Twins; Bunny Brown and his Sister Sue, and so on.
In addition, there were Roy Blakely, Fee Wee Wilson, The Dare-well Chums, Poppy Ott, and so on. Most important of all, at least to me, were The Rover Boys. There were three of them—Dick, Tom, and Sam—with Tom, the middle one, always described as "fun-loving."
My friends might not be able to afford science-fiction magazines, but some of them had obtained one or another of these books, and occasionally they could be persuaded to lend one to me. I would read and return it, and I had to do so rather on the sly. If my father had caught me reading one of those books, he would undoubtedly have confiscated it and I might not have persuaded him to return it to its original owner.
One of the books, I remember, I managed to keep. It was given to me because it was rather dilapidated and I somehow kept it secure and read it over and over again. It was The Rover Boys on the Great Lakes. In it were not only the three Rover boys, but also Andy, the villainous sneak, and his father, the reformed jailbird, and Mr. Crab tree, an oily confidence man, and Dora the Heroine, and her well-intentioned but weak mother, who seemed to be a sitting duck for old Crabtree.
One book just wasn't enough, but what was I going to do about it? Buy books I couldn't; and to borrow books seemed very difficult.
A year or so earlier it had occurred to me in the case of a library book concerning the Greek myths that if I copied the book I could then have it permanently. I obtained a nickel copybook and with the fountain pen I had won in the spelling bee, I began to copy it.
It took me just a page and a half to see that there were two flaws in my plan. I could only keep a library book for two weeks, and it was going to take me two years to copy it. Second, my hand was going to fall off in another page and a half. I gave up.
Now, though, it occurred to me that the mistake was in copying. What I ought to do was to write a different and new book, one that was all my own. I wouldn't have to depend on a library book for that, so it wouldn't matter how long it took, and I need write only as long as my hand stayed on.
I got another nickel copybook and sat down in the corner of the kitchen and got to work.
I wish I knew what date that was because that was the very first time I ever engaged myself in original composition that had not been a command performance for a schoolteacher. There is no way I can know or ever find out, but I was still in junior high school at the time and I think in RC. That would make it the fall of 1931, most likely, or just before my twelfth birthday.
What I was going to write was a series book, the first of many, I decided (apparently I always had the instinctive knowledge that I would be prolific), and I called it The Greenville Chums at College. I had seen a book called The Darewell Chums at College, and it seemed to me that by substituting Greenville for Darewell I had made all possible concessions to the need for originality.
I wrote two chapters that evening, making it up as I was going along (something that is still my system), and my mind was full of it the next morning. That day at lunch, I said to one of the youngsters who was particularly assiduous in attending my story-telling sessions: "Hey, let me tell you a story."
And tell him I did, in full detail, and just about word for word, up to the point where I had faded out. He was listening, rapt with attention, and when I stopped, he demanded I continue. I explained that it was all I had so far and he said, "Can I borrow the book when you've finished reading it?"
I was astonished. I had either neglected to make it clear to him, or he had failed to understand, that I was writing the book. He thought it was another already printed story I was retelling. The implied compliment staggered me, and from that day on, I secretly took myself seriously as a writer. I remember the name of the young man whose remark unwittingly did this for me. It was Emmanuel Bershadsky.
I never saw him again after I left junior high school, but thank you, Emmanuel, wherever you are.
Still, The Greenville Chums at College did not continue forever. It petered out after eight chapters.
The trouble was that I was trying to imitate the series books without knowing anything but what I read there. Their characters were small-town boys, so mine were, for I imagined Greenville to be a town in upstate New York. 5 Their character went to college, so mine did.
Unfortunately, a junior-high-school youngster living in a shabby neighborhood in Brooklyn knows very little about small-town life and even less about college. Even I, myself, was forced eventually to recognize the fact that I didn't know what I was talking about (especially
5 There is a town named Greenville in upstate New York. Naturally, I didn't know that at the time, but I have been there in recent years.
when the plot made it necessary to describe what went on inside a chemistry laboratory). After eight chapters I had to quit.
Just the same, from that time on, I never stayed away from my copybooks for long. Every once in a while I would drift back to try my hand at writing again. Nothing lasted very long for quite a number of years, but I never quit altogether.
5
It wasn't just science fiction and series books that I longed for, nor even the hero pulps or library books. Something else I saw on my father's newsstand was The World Almanac, and I began laying siege to him. What I wanted was that the next time The World Almanac appeared, one issue was to go to me to keep.
The World Almanac, in those days, cost 50 cents. My father got it wholesale, naturally, for y/Vi cents. It is a good commentary on just how tight things were in those days that my father hesitated. I think I swung it when I explained that The World
Almanac came out toward the end of the year and that my birthday was on January 2, and that I wanted it for a birthday present.
In our family, we didn't worry about birthday presents, or any kind of presents. Christmas presents certainly did not exist; we never so much as recognized the existence of Christmas itself (except that we got a long school vacation then); but we didn't fudge the situation by giving Chanukah presents either. It seemed useless to give each other presents—especially the kind of trivial objects that counted as presents. After all, the important things never count as presents. No one, for instance, would accept the fact that one had been fed, housed, and clothed all year as a birthday present. No, what was needed was something silly, and for something silly there was never any money.
It might have been different if we had collateral members of the family or close friends. If presents came in, some would have to go out, and the whole ritual would begin. However, the candy store made social relations impossible and, by the time we had moved to Essex Street, we saw Uncle Joe and his family only very occasionally—and they were our only relatives.
I knew, nevertheless, that birthday presents existed, at least in theory, and I laid claim to The World Almanac on that ground. My father finally bit the bullet and got it for me. Specifically, he got me The 1932 World Almanac as a present for my eleventh birthday.
I never had any present out of which I got such mileage. I admit it cost my father more than the book itself. He had to get me a sheaf of
no In Memory Yet Green
graph paper, and a thick colored pencil, blue on one side and red on the other.
With all that I got to work. I had been counting automobiles when I was four years old. Now, seven years later, I took advantage of all the people who were counting and measuring the world over in order that a book like The World Almanac might be filled with endless columns of tiny figures.
Actually, I could only work when I wasn't at school, or doing homework, or working in the store, or watching Stanley, so it took me a long time, but I ended by making scores of bar graphs and circle graphs and line graphs of various collections of statistics. There were populations and areas and national debts and mountain heights and death rates and everything else.
I didn't care what it was, just so long as I could arrange it all in order and make a pretty picture out of it. And, given my tenacious memory, I got a lot out of it that has remained with me all the rest of my life.
I was in JHS 149 for only two years and then I was finished with it. This time I was graduated.
I had left PS 182 in mid-stream because my family had moved. I had been transferred from PS 202 to JHS 149 without ceremony. But when I finished JHS 149, I was subjected to graduation ceremonies for the first time. It was in June 1932, and I was 12V2 years old.
The school held the ceremonies at a fancy auditorium somewhere in Brooklyn. My father gave me a fountain pen as a graduation present to replace the old one that I suppose I had managed to use up. More important, he and my mother actually managed to shake off the candy-store duties (I don't remember whether they closed the store or hired a temporary store sitter) in order to attend the graduation. They took it very seriously.
I remember only two things about it. First, the glee club sang "Gaudeamus Igitur," which included the line "Glorious youth is with us." I was at once overwhelmed with a sharp and sorrowful pang at the thought that I was graduating, that I was twelve years old, and that youth was slipping fast away.
The other thing I remember was that two awards were given out, one for excellence in biology and the other for excellence in mathematics. Both winners marched forward and onto the stage and were covered with glory in the sight of their proud parents. And I knew that
somewhere in the audience my father's face was setting into lines of grim disapproval, since neither winner was I—and both he and I took it for granted that I was the smartest boy in the school.
Sure enough, when we were all home, my father, in awful patriarchal tones, demanded to know why it was that I had won neither prize.
"Pappa," I said (for I had anticipated this and had had time to work out the best way of putting it), "the kid who won the mathematics prize is lousy in biology. The kid who won the biology prize can't add two and two. And as for me, I was second in line for both prizes."
That was quite true, and it took me neatly off the hook. Not another word was said.
PART II
Education
in and out of School
Entering High School
Having graduated from junior high school, the next step was high school, of course. In general, pupils those days went to the local high school and as far as East New York was concerned, Thomas Jefferson High School was the local institution. It was a perfectly good high school, but my parents were thinking ahead.
In eastern Europe, you see, the most prestigious profession a bright Jewish boy could get into was the rabbinate. When a young man became a rabbi, his family was proud, and his social prestige, within the Jewish community, was enormous. Of course, he remained poor, and was nobody at all outside the Jewish community, but there was no real way he could be anything at all in the Gentile community, anyway.
In the United States, where social opportunities were greater, it was less valuable to be a rabbi and more valuable to be something that would involve an income and general prestige. The obvious profession for a boy was medicine, and for a girl it was to marry into medicine.
Every immigrant Jewish family in the United States could ask as its share of heaven on Earth to have every son a doctor and every daughter married to a doctor. One of each would be a minimum desire.
My father took it for granted that I was going to be the Asimov family's doctor; and if my father took that for granted, I did, too. I didn't know any better, for one thing, and for another I had the best motive for ambition in the world. If I didn't do something, I was going to inherit the candy-store business, and I sure as anything didn't want to do that.
The only trouble with the ambition for doctorhood was that it was well known that too many Jewish youngsters had the same idea, and the medical schools were not anxious to become more Jewish than the general population was. In fact, there were plenty of medical schools whose administrators were quite willing to err on the side of caution and to allow the student body to be almost or entirely ethnically pure in the direction of white Christianity.
It made sense, therefore, to go to schools with particular prestige. This would tend to deodorize your Semitism before you accosted the dainty nostrils of the admission boards.
The word was that Boys High School of Brooklyn was just such a
school. It was well known to be excellent in mathematics, and although it had a football team, it was the mathematics team that could be counted on to win. This was very impressive to my father, who was proud of his own computational ability and who would keep a close eye on what I was doing in arithmetic, since that was the one subject in which he felt himself to be my superior. 1
It was therefore to Boys High School that I applied for entrance and it was there I went. I think three boys of the JHS 149 class went there, no more. It seems to me that this move had important consequences in a direction my father would never have thought of.
Thomas Jefferson High School was coeducational; Boys High School, as the name implies, was not. I didn't give the matter any thought then, since girls were still a matter of being pleasant to look at, as they had been in kindergarten, but I did not yet think of them in connection with anything more than that.
Yet had I gone to Jefferson High and spent my early teens there, I would undoubtedly have discovered that girls existed for more than looking at.
And there was the real harm of skipping grades. I was getting into the second year of high school at the age of 12Y2, and the normal age at that level was 15. A 15-year-old girl might look very interesting to a 13-year-old boy, but a teen-age girl can barely see a boy her own age as anything but disgusting
ly juvenile, and nothing on earth would have forced her to notice, let alone be friendly with, a 13-year-old boy.
Had I gone to Jefferson, then, I might easily have spent my time in frustration and despair and my schoolwork might have gone to the devil. It was a narrow escape, all the more so since I hadn't any idea that I was escaping.
To be sure, there were difficulties in going to a boys' school. It meant that I had very little day-to-day contact with girls, and that introduced complications and had an effect on me that shows itself to this day. Still what did happen was, in my opinion, ease itself compared with what would have happened in Jefferson.
In September 1932, then, I entered Boys High School, but spent the first half of the tenth grade (or, as we called it, "the third term")
1 This only lasted until I began to study algebra. I found that problems that required subtle reasoning if you tried to solve them arithmetically, became childishly simple if you used the formal techniques of algebra. My father, when I showed him how that was done, indignantly rejected that as cheating on the grounds that any fool could solve problems with algebra so that it destroyed the value and use of intelligence—nor could I ever argue him out of that viewpoint.
at Waverly Annex. This was a small, ramshackle school that served as one of three reservoirs intended to keep the student body at Boys High itself from overflowing its bounds. (I don't remember the exact location of the Annex.)
The Annex contributed a column to the high-school newspaper (a "news from Waverly" thing), and I volunteered to write it. It was the very first bit of writing I ever did that was published anywhere.
In memory yet green : the autobiography of Isaac Asimov, 1920-1954 Page 14